


the kind of love of which I speak

by feralphoenix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Childbirth, Dependent personality disorder, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Pre-Canon, Pregnancy, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-02 18:56:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10950696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: A brief chronicle of events leading to the birth of Asriel Dreemurr.





	the kind of love of which I speak

**Author's Note:**

> _(he’s just a kid and he never knew_ – a lake drinks in a [boy](http://marchenwings.tumblr.com/post/157556687709/) who cannot swim)

The first time you talk about having Asriel is only two centuries into the term of your imprisonment—give or take a handful of years.

The castle and the city of Home are still all but newly hewn from the mountain’s stone. It took time for the monsters to accept this dark kingdom as yours, and longer for them to stop mourning the sky for long enough to try to make this place habitable. Fifty years ago the monsters turned to you and asked you to name it, and you swallowed and did your best, and your wife sighed into her hands and laughed wetly until you could not help but smile back.

Your parents were good at names. You failed to inherit their creativity as you failed to inherit many things from them, but they are dead and dust beneath the feet of the very humans you used to play with when you were all children, sneaking away from the monster and human towns where the adults would all frown.

Toriel came to you in your room that night. The separate rooms were a necessity because to sleep packed in together would be to risk hurting one another if memories of war encroached your dreams and you woke up roaring with killing spells burning in your hands. The scar on your belly from her claws had not yet fully healed, the guard hairs of your coat sparse and leaving only the soft undercoat half-grown and discolored; the burn wound you left on her forearm was almost completely gone, but still visible if you knew where to look.

You craved the comfort of her presence and solidity throughout the night as much as you craved her weight on your back and her breath in your ear, the wet burning heat of her inside you, but separate beds were safer. You and she were each other’s only shelter from the despair of your situation and the crushing weight of your roles as king and queen. You would hand your soul away to be shattered underfoot before you saw her hurt.

So on this night she has come to your room, and together you fuck roughly and inelegantly until all the weight of lordly dignity has sloughed from your bodies and you feel as young and raw as you have always been underneath it all. She makes a really quite terrible pun at the end that you will forget sometime in the next century, but you will never forget that this is when you come, or the sound of her laughter as she rides you through your climax, or the pressure of her hands and claws on your shoulder and your hip.

You sit side by side on your mattress after with your two sets of paws trailing on the floor, your head on her shoulder and your arm around her waist, hers around your shoulders, both of you bare in your fur and you staining the sheets and not caring.

You aren’t sure quite what possesses you to do it, but it’s just so comfortable here with her in this tiny room, free of the immensity of your people’s expectations. You close your eyes and open your mouth and the thought you’ve been mulling over on and off for weeks pops out: “Tori, I want to make a child with you.”

She squeezes your shoulder and nuzzles the base of your horn. “I cannot lie and tell you that I don’t want children, Gorey,” she says, and you suck in your breath because in that moment your head rings with a wild fizzy dizziness and wanting slicks you wetter than you’ve ever been in your entire life. But Toriel goes on, sensible and matter-of-fact, and you listen to her like you’ve always listened. “But we cannot, at least not yet. It is too early. Our people still need us, the kingdom of monsters is still too unstable. Everyone knows what it would mean, for a Boss Monster to give birth: They would not be able to rejoice in our child’s life, they would only see our deaths. It would be the ruin of us all.”

She’s right, just like she always is, and you tell her so. “It is just that sometimes,” you go on, so hesitant that you nearly stop, “I do get tired.”

Toriel holds you tight and kisses your forehead and says nothing, because although she was never royal from birth like you, though she was just your friend and then your parents’ general while you were the treasured sheltered shackled prince—inasmuch as anyone can ever understand, she does.

So it is probably correct of her, to refuse to sow your deaths into your belly, to refrain from pulling the both of you back in sync with time—because that is how you think of it, and what a thing it would be to create a new life simply so that the end of your own would again be in sight.

Toriel strokes your face, and you hold one another in the silence for some time, and then she bids you good night and returns to her own room. You cut the spells keeping the lights on and stare up into the blackness of the ceiling and try not to feel the weight of the tons of stone between you and the stars, and you resolve to forget about this, and you sleep.

 

 

The second time you talk about having Asriel is somewhere around the five hundred year mark: Home is older now, its corners becoming worn, and the city has grown. A very few monsters have ventured out to live in the cold forest beyond, now, and still fewer venture out into the damp wet tunnels beyond to fish and scavenge human trash. You are still tired, but you have grown used to the tiredness; you can get used to almost anything, you have found, up to and including outliving virtually everyone you have ever loved and trusted. The survivors of the war are fewer and further between with each passing decade.

Neither you nor Toriel wakes anymore from nightmares ready to fight, but you have found over the past few decades that it is too strange after all this time to share a bed: Neither of yours is really big enough to fit you both. She kicks and steals the blankets, and you snore. And you are already used to making love and then separating to sleep, anyway.

This day, you are walking the ramparts of the castle for a much-needed break; Toriel has been dealing with paperwork all day, and you have been out in the city talking to your people all day, and these are the things that you and your wife are most skilled at, but an entire day of wielding your skills as rulers to the fullest is still draining.

But there are no such things as breaks truly when you are the rulers of a kingdom such as this, and so your break becomes a debriefing session.

“The problem is that we are stagnating, Gorey,” Toriel says, and her red-brown eyes sweep over the distant silhouettes of Home’s many tiny buildings. The streets are lit with magic and with rudimentary electricity from the water wheel, looking like your ancient memories of fireflies; distant beams of light streak down like little threads from the cave ceiling but don’t reach the ground. “I can improve our infrastructure and you can go out among the citizens to raise morale all we like, but trapped is trapped and the people know it. We need to think of something better, something newer, to keep everyone engaged and prevent them from falling down.”

She looks over her shoulder at you then, uncertain, lit from below by the city and lit from above by the faint natural light from outside. She is the most beautiful creature you have ever beheld, as she has been for all of your lives since you were children, her leading you by the hand to get into mischief while the adults worried for the future. You will never love anyone else as much as you love her, never ever.

And you’re drenched and aching in heartbeats, because you’ve been waiting for so long for this, for an offer—even such an unspoken one—to fill your womb with life. But five centuries of kingship have taught you to read people, and five centuries of marriage have taught you to read Toriel especially, and you _know_ what answer will please her the most.

“Perhaps not yet,” you say, and you are rewarded with her lips curling, and so you reach out and take her hand for her to squeeze. “Our kingdom is ready, yes, but—shouldn’t we also have our child because we want them, not just for political expediency?”

Toriel holds your hands and steps in close to bump her nose against yours. “Oh, yes, Gorey,” she says, so proud that you shiver. “I did so hope that you would think of it that way as well.”

 

 

The third time you talk about having Asriel it is a new millennia by the human calendar, over nine hundred years into the imprisonment of monsters. You have made dinner and Toriel has made dessert and you are sitting at the table eating without much to really talk about, the silence worn comfortable and familiar by long long experience. You had kidded earlier about taking a medicinal spa day to just fool about, and Toriel had returned this with several jokes each sillier than the last, and as you reflect on this you turn idly to her just as she turns to you, and you both open your mouths at the same time with the same hopeful furrow upon both your brow and hers.

“Do you think—” you say as she begins “I would like—” and then you both fall silent and stare at each other for a moment, and you burst out laughing at the same time: Giddy and terrifying and freeing from the very pits of you on up.

You talk about it for a few hours, then, instead of heading down to the baths to take a soak and forget about the stresses of the day. To remember not to expect anything, and appreciate whatever you get, not to hope for a daughter or a son or neither because it will be your child’s job to choose, not yours to try to shape them into something. That they might be disabled, or prone to illness—that is a worry. One of your ephemeral scientists did research into the mind and heart and proclaimed that a history of trauma in parents creates a greater likelihood of mental illness in children, and it took you and Toriel both centuries to really recover from the war.

Whatever the child is, you must love them and support them and remember that they are a person, that they are here because you and Toriel actively chose to make them. They must be trained to become the next ruler, but they must be allowed to be a proper monster outside their royal blood, too. Your lives must center around your child first, even above your duties as rulers if need be. You never really chose to become the king, and when you and Toriel fell in love it was not her fault you were the prince, but you are choosing to become parents.

Afterwards it’s endearingly awkward, summoning memories of your first time from beneath the mud and silt of time; Toriel mounts you almost politely but thrusts into you in sharp forceful nervy strokes that make you shout, the pace itself so clipped and uneven that you barely come.

But Toriel nibbles at your shoulders and calls you by your name—little whispers and moans of your pet name first, then your full name—and her heat is perfect as it floods you.

 

 

Five months are a drop in the bucket compared to all the time that you have lived, and these feel simultaneously unbearably slow and gone in the blink of an eye.

Some things you and Toriel discreetly got ready while you were still trying to get pregnant, and others you remember in a rush and scramble to procure during. You’re built heavy enough that you don’t start to show until over halfway through, past the early sickness and the aches but full into the part where your breasts grow and your middle goes round and taut underneath the usual layer of thick fat. Toriel is steadier than you, excitement building like a volcano, shining positivity to carry you through mood swings. She is rushing towards motherhood with a scavenged camcorder in one hand and a manic gleam in her eye, and she wakes you in the middle of the night with puns to make you laugh, and you cling to her harder than you have since those first years in the dark.

It starts as something that you tell your close friends and associates and spreads as your appearance changes, wondering whispers like ripples throughout the monsters— _the king is pregnant—_ and as days and weeks count down it feels as though the whole of the underground is holding its breath.

Five months and three days, as near as you can approximate it to your child’s conception, your water finally breaks. Toriel hovers, wide-eyed and wordless, the most uncertain you have ever seen her, and you—you remember your mother telling you that she gave birth alone, your other parent left outside to bar entry to the birthing chamber, but it is also custom to allow your partners to attend if you so choose and you need her now more than ever. So.

Six hours of labor, of nauseating anxiety that you’re somehow doing something wrong, that the fetus will die before it is born, that your souls will somehow refuse to pour their light into the newborn and it will die, that _you_ will die. It is easily one of the hardest things you have ever done, right up there with taking the throne upon your own parents’ deaths and seeing the sky disappear as the humans stole the surface from you with their magic barrier. Toriel reminds you to breathe and to push, and she leaves your side only twice, to bring you water.

And then it’s over—there’s a tug at your chest and Toriel gasps and presses a hand to hers as your child pulls at your souls to form their own. You lean back against the blankets and tilt your head until your horns have hit the floor, and you breathe.

Toriel takes your child to clean them and cut their umbilical cord, to look them over, and you watch as the tiny infant kicks minuscule perfect feet and squeaks in protest. Your wife looks positively beatific, a smile curving her lovely mouth and her dark eyes damp; she rests the baby on your chest, where you tuck your chin so that you may look at them.

They are so very, very small—so small that they could fit into your two cupped hands easily. Their fur is still white down, thin on their hands and feet and their mouth and the base of their belly. Their eyes are still sealed shut, and will be for another month; their ears are folded tightly, but their hearing should be fully developed in another few days. They are the single most perfect living creature you have ever beheld, and already you can see Toriel in the tilt of their little face.

“Now,” says your wife, because she is a very wicked woman, “what sort of name have you picked out for our child, Gorey?”

“I have never,” you tell her, your voice barely a croak, “pretended to be good at naming things, my dear. So if you do not like my idea, I give you full veto powers.”

“Very nice,” Toriel replies, still twinkling down at you, “but what is your idea?”

“Asriel,” you reply stoically. It is the best you can come up with. Perhaps uninspired, but all the same—one third you, and two thirds her.

“Asriel,” she repeats, and nods. “For you, that is quite inspired indeed. I think that I like it. Asriel Dreemurr.”

You decide to let her gentle teasing go unremarked upon and stroke baby Asriel’s back with one finger, resting as they nurse.

“Good job, dear,” Toriel says, and strokes your forehead. You close your eyes again and sigh, content.

 

 

(You’re forced to surrender Asriel to her for only a little while afterward, as you deliver the afterbirth and then, as is custom, eat it for the energy. It’s bloody and sharp in your mouth, the first meat you’ve eaten in nearly a thousand years aside from fish and snails.)


End file.
